Clinton Campaign Confronts Erosion of Women's Support

A year ago, the most enthusiastic supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton were women, who sympathized with her plight in the wars over her husband's impeachment. Democratic, independent and even Republican women also shared her concerns about education, health care and children.

Today Mrs. Clinton's support among these women, even the Democrats, has dropped, forcing her campaign for the United States Senate to make a priority of bringing them back. Her advisers insist that she will. But part of the challenge, they admit, is to figure out why the women abandoned Mrs. Clinton in the first place, particularly as Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani woos them himself.

Mrs. Clinton's advisers readily blame the wobbly beginnings of her campaign, her political mistakes of the fall. They note that her wavering support reflects the nature of the women's vote in general, which does not necessarily support women, particularly in New York.

Right now, they say that they are also struggling to overcome psychological factors not normally at play in political campaigns -- specifically, the attitudes of women toward Mrs. Clinton's marriage, ambition and the power she derived from the most powerful man in the world. Part of the problem, the advisers say, is that many of the same women who rallied to her side as a victim have mixed feelings about whether that should translate into support for her now that she is a political candidate.

Mrs. Clinton acknowledged some of her problems with women in a recent interview. ''I think it's understandable that people say, 'Well, who is she, and why is she doing this, where is she coming from, and what has she ever done on her own?' '' she said. ''And that is part of what the campaign will have to tell.''

Mr. Giuliani, who in recent weeks has sought the votes of women by running statewide commercials about the city's program to fight domestic violence, has declined to discuss why he thinks Mrs. Clinton's support among women has wavered. And so far, at least, the polls do not show that the women who abandoned Mrs. Clinton are rallying to his side.

But recently, one of Mr. Giuliani's campaign advisers said that ''the manner in which she has engaged has been frustrating to people,'' and added that ''people were expecting strong, decisive, independent -- and they're not getting it.''

Whatever the reasons, the numbers tell their own story: in a January 1999 poll conducted by Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 58 percent of the women polled supported Mrs. Clinton, compared with 34 percent who supported Mr. Giuliani. Among Democratic women, the numbers were 81 percent for Mrs. Clinton compared with 17 percent for Mr. Giuliani.

In a Marist poll this month, Mrs. Clinton had support from 44 percent of women over all, compared with 43 percent for Mr. Giuliani. Among Democratic women, Mrs. Clinton had 67 percent, compared with Mr. Giuliani's 19 percent.

Pollsters say that what has happened is to a large extent typical. ''It's a very common pattern with women candidates to have an early surge with women voters,'' said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who is researching the nature of the women's vote for Emily's List, a political action committee that raises money for women candidates. ''At first, a lot of women voters are very enthusiastic, but then they start to feel some ambivalence: 'Does she support my values, or is she a challenge to my values?' In the end, women who win tend to consolidate the women's vote, and they usually do.''

But the same pollsters also say that Mrs. Clinton is unlike any female candidate before her: a first lady and a professional woman who for decades put her husband's career first, then used her extraordinary status and experience as the president's wife to advance her own.

While many feminists applaud her for her accomplishments -- Gloria Steinem calls Mrs. Clinton one of the first ''crossover'' candidates in that she has made use of both traditional male and female experience -- other women find the multiple identities of Mrs. Clinton confusing and troubling.

''I just don't know who this woman is anymore,'' said Carol Lalli, a Manhattan freelance writer, a Democrat and a former editor at Food & Wine, Simon & Schuster and Rizzoli. ''I don't really know what she stands for. I don't know if this would be happening if it weren't for her husband's position. I don't know that we've been able to see what her real accomplishments could be. She's been thrust upon us.''

Susan Aldrich, a Democrat from Pelham, N.Y., and the administrator of a health program, expressed other reservations. ''Right now, I'm somewhat unimpressed that she stayed with her husband all these years, and I'm tired of the Clintons,'' she said. But Ms. Aldrich also said she did not yet know enough about the issues to say how she would vote in November.

To answer those concerns, the Clinton campaign has begun a major effort to redefine their candidate for career women and mothers by emphasizing that Mrs. Clinton has been both.

An 18-minute video shown at Mrs. Clinton's official announcement of her Senate campaign in Purchase on Feb. 6 shows her in a soft pink sweater and pearls, but it also shows footage of her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech and has an image of her as a young staff member to a Watergate impeachment committee.

The campaign also distributed 400,000 leaflets, titled ''Hillary: The Real Story,'' that focus on Mrs. Clinton's work as a staff lawyer for the Children's Defense Fund, her ''pioneering legal career'' and her work for children and families.

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''Though her days were full of court appointments, speeches and meetings,'' the leaflet says, ''Hillary always made time for her daughter. Soccer games, ballet recitals, even just shopping or hanging out together, Hillary made sure she was there for Chelsea.'' Barely mentioned is President Clinton.

''I think a lot of women don't know about anything I did before the White House,'' Mrs. Clinton said in the interview. ''And again, it is my burden to talk about the professional and public career I had independently of my husband.''

''I mean, I have a very long record of independent public service,'' she added, ''but it was understandably subsumed into the larger mission of the president in 1992.''

Mrs. Clinton also said that after her attempt to overhaul the nation's health care system as first lady ended in well-publicized failure, ''I went back to doing what I had always done, but none of it had the high visibility or the tension that health care did. So I think a lot of the awareness of what I was doing really kind of faded from the scene.''

She said that a national tour to promote her 1996 book, ''It Takes a Village,'' ''conveyed a lot of my beliefs about the kinds of social responsibilities we should have toward families,'' but ''you know, none of that was headline-grabbing.''

''So the glimpses that people had of me was part of this team, part of this administration,'' she said. ''And it was the same challenge that the vice president faced.''

Mrs. Clinton's advisers say they are confident they can bring back their base voters by focusing on the issues that polls show are most important to women: education, health care and Social Security. ''We're positively convinced that our issues are the ones that would move our constituency,'' said Bill de Blasio, Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager.

Still, the campaign is concerned enough about Mrs. Clinton's wavering support among women -- particularly white women, where she trails Mr. Giuliani -- that advisers have gone back to look at how women voted in previous New York elections.

Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton's pollster, recently asked researchers for the Marist poll to pull out the voting patterns of white women in the 1998 Senate race between Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, and the incumbent Republican, Alfonse M. D'Amato.

As late as Sept. 29 of that year, Mr. Penn found, white women were supporting Mr. D'Amato over Mr. Schumer by 46 percent to 43 percent. But the final vote in November showed that Mr. Schumer, the victor, beat Mr. D'Amato among white women by 53 percent to 46 percent.

''The women's vote tends to vote Democratic late,'' Mr. Penn said. He also said that white women in New York were a ''fairly difficult vote'' for any Democrat, in large part because Democrats make up less than half of that group. Among nonwhite women in the most recent Marist poll, Mrs. Clinton leads Mr. Giuliani by 79 percent to 11 percent.

To shore up her support among women, Mrs. Clinton is also concentrating on women's groups, as she did last Thursday in a Manhattan speech to a ''women's networking'' event organized by women at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

In her half-hour, anecdote-laden remarks to more than 500 female lawyers and other professionals, Mrs. Clinton spoke in personal terms of her years as the first female partner at the Rose Law Firm and of her 1979 pregnancy.

''And I just kept getting bigger and bigger, and my partners just would avert their eyes as I walked down the hallway,'' Mrs. Clinton said to laughter. ''And they never said anything to me, and I didn't at the time know what to say to them. This had never happened.''

Afterward, a 29-year-old associate at the firm, Joan Malmud, said Mrs. Clinton's remarks had impressed her. ''I started off really strongly for Hillary because she's such an articulate, intelligent woman and her politics are mine,'' she said. ''And then I became disillusioned. I felt that she was changing her character to meet a political need. I was beginning to think that she was more plastic.''

But after her speech, Ms. Malmud said, ''she came off to me more as someone who breaks new ground.''